Nabokov's early novels are marked by a quirky stylistic trope of animated objects which Nabokov used intriguingly in order to confront the reader’s experience of literary metaphor. Essentially, Nabokov pursues an original, highly individualistic, phenomenology of objects that makes the reader re-vision the world as a result of this defamiliarization.
In Nabokov’s first novel, Mary, this characteristic is not much in evidence, but in the majority of Nabokov’s novels up to The Gift (in which it reaches its apogee, a novel itself much centred on a number of questions of style and language) and The real Life of Sebastian Knight, and in the short stories of this period, destabilizing objects is a regular concern. Nabokov’s essay ‘Man and Things’ (1928) sets out his thinking on this topic. In it he takes a kind of Berkeleyan viewpoint in which it is not the object itself that exists for the viewer but only what our perception makes of it. ‘A thing, a thing made by someone, does not exist in itself’ (69) he states, but is ‘dependent upon who looks on it’. Things thus ‘bring to mind’ images which are the material of thought, of representation (he regularly criticized James Joyce for his over-estimation of the verbal-linguistic in the constitution of human thought or experience). Nabokov sees us as ‘lending things our feelings’ – which he calls ‘anthropomorphic ardour’ (72). He even goes as far to argue that things die when we ‘neglect’ them, and we often mourn them when we have done so (73).
In Invitation to a Beheading the central character Cincinnatus is shown to be surrounded by a ‘false logic of things’, chimera, objects that are animated by others, by the agents of the state who are working to subjectify him. In his experience we see him feeling a ‘general instability, …a certain flaw in all visible matter’, even if the ‘objects still observed an outward propriety’ (172). In this Orwellian and Kafkaesque world there is a moral concern to address the political status of objects and to confront the issue of who or what is doing the primary seeing and defining along with the phenomenological status of everyday objects.
This concern is also prominent is many of the interviews and essays Nabokov made concerned with questions of his style. In his fragment-essays ‘The creative writer’ and ‘style’ (both circa. 1941) he shows a concern to ‘dislocate the given world’ (189), to make the reader see the ‘whatness of things’ (187), to ‘move objects from their usual series’ (198), and to bring things out of the domain of habitual modes of experience (188) (in this he shows an affinity for Proust). This concern is particularly marked in Look at the Harlequins with its performative ‘look’ in its title and where the aim is ‘to make iniquity absurd’ (197).
But Nabokov consciously rejected the type of politically-committed literature of writers like Sartre and Camus, the Soviet novelist-ideologues of the Stalinist era such as Sholokhov, or even novelists like Pasternak who were critical of the regime. Mostly, when objects crop up in his novels they do so apolitically, defamiliarizing, to ‘reveal the most elementary things in their unique lustre’ (Think, Write, Speak 132). The aim is to redefine domestic objects in their particularity, to give them a kind of agency, like the mirror ‘that had plenty of work to do’ in Laughter in the Dark (37). In Despair, Nabokov’s Doestoyevskian novel about a Hermann Hermann and his double, Hermann laments the ‘sick mirror’ he has created of himself, the mirror representing an outside, perhaps narcissistic, view of himself that he has fallen for when he stumbles on his double. Hermann believes that having a double might allow him to escape the confines of the self he has created, that by killing his live reflection he can achieve freedom, to re-imagine himself. Hermann has an ‘eye to eye monologue’ with his double, but he is put into a critical light when Nabokov shows that in seeing just the outside of things, people as much and as like objects, Hermann is on a faltering path of redundant defamiliarization:
I cannot recollect now if the ‘monologue’ was a slip or a joke. The thing is typed out on good, eggshell blue notepaper with a frigate for watermark: but it is now sadly creased and soiled at the corners; vague imprints of his fingers, perhaps. Thus it would seem that I were the receiver – not the sender. (45)
Hermann is attempting to create a world of dead things that lack their own animation. It is also, in writing, what Nabokov sees as going on in the ‘cooperatives of words’ in tired metaphors or, historically, the way objects from earlier periods become obsolescent because the generation that animated them has dissipated (338).
The Gift serves as the apogee of Nabokov’s concern with reanimating things. In fact, the ‘Gift’ in the novel is the ability ‘to go beyond the surface of things’ (326). This is contrasted to the positivist scientific idea of objects, be they human, social or natural. In this novel Nabokov directly criticises cold German systematizing philosophical materialists like Feuerbach and Hegel. Fyodor, the protagonist artist sees ‘things like words as [having] their cases’ but commonly-understood dictionary-syntactical confinement of meaning ‘must be displaced’ (236-7) by a poetical imagination built upon ‘chance and emotion’ (198).
At one point around half-way through the novel, there is a sudden shift in the syntax and style (approximately 173 of the Penguin edition) when Nabokov’s metaphors and his characterization of objects becomes somewhat tired, predictable, conventional – a blond woman is described woodenly as ‘buxom’ and ‘whose soul was more like that of a replica of her apartment’ (186). A little further on, Herzen (whom Nabokov associates with Russian revolutionary materialists) is described as a writer producing ‘false glib glitter’ (198). And the café in which Fyodor meets Zina is described in a kind of dead prose as ‘an empty little café where the counter was painted in indigo colour and where dark blue gnomelike (the dull imprecise simile here underlined by merging with its marker – ‘like’) lamps…’. Such prose contrasts with the earlier part of the novel in which a sustained defamiliarization of the object world is evident. In particular, Nabokov sees natural phenomena, such as ‘the bent shadow of a poplar sitting there’ (51); a ‘young chestnut tree [is] unable to walk alone’ (57) and ‘dun birches…stood around blankly with all their attention turned inside themselves’. This latter instance continues to note ‘a little man was tossing a stick into the water at the request of his dog’ (45); and rain ‘loses the ability to make any sound’ (75).
Early on in Despair Hermann Hermann recounts the walk he took that led him to meet his doppelganger, Felix:
I trod upon soft sticky soil: dandelions trembled in the wind and a shoe with a hole in it was basking in the sunshine under a fence. (3)
The reader is struck by this shoe, abandoned, an object which has lost its pair and its ‘use-value’ but is still seen as being alive, animated by the verb ‘basking’. The reader is, simultaneously, aware of the subtle contrast in the metaphoric language by the more conventional attribution of ‘trembling’ to a plant like a dandelion eddying in the breeze. This is juxtaposition in Nabokov’s earlier work of conventional and animated metaphors is a regular one. It is Nabokov’s way of disturbing the reader’s literary sensibilities, to make them experience the ‘Gift’ of undermining cliched writing passing itself off as literature. In The Real Life of Sebastian Knight this occurs regularly, thus we find ‘letters resent being unfolded’ (34), the author is described as ‘budding’ (46). Bookshelves are ‘densely peopled’ which seems conventional, in contrast to the following sentence in which a writing desk ‘looked sullen and distant’ (30). A reflection is seen, commonly, as ‘live’ but is quickly followed with the attribution of a window as being ‘sick’ (51)
That shoe basking and yet useless in the human world seems to be part-way back to returning to nature, which means in Nabokov’s world to have lost its conventional meaning, that it can now only appeal to us to re-view it, reexperience its thingliness before it is lost to us. The idea of ‘thingliness’ reminds me of Derrida’s articles on Van Gogh’s boots and what Heidegger made of them in his ‘Origin of the work of Art’. Derrida, like Nabokov, was concerned with how Van Gogh’s boots were non-functioning, and, as the shoe in Despair is subject to the novelist’s revisioning, revivifying, so in Van Gogh the boots become reviewed, become the (a) ‘subject’ in painting (301). Derrida partly is concerned with literary comparisons to the painterly, suggesting that Van Gogh’s boots have a figurative value comparable to metonymy or synecdoche (302). But his main concern is how things are ‘brought into the nameable’ (306) in painting, literature, in the artistic generation of cultural value.
Things like boots become nameable when they are disturbed from their (back)ground, related in the Aristotelian concept of an originary state hypokeimenon (305). In paintings like Van Gogh’s boots this revisioning process occurs or, in literature like Nabokov’s there is a detaching and estrangement of the objects of the natural world or shoes and other domestic(ated) objects. Nabokov’s Gift, like Van Gogh’s, is to bring objects out of their expected gaze, their ground, and into revision-ing. Derrida categorizes this more generally as disturbing objects’ ‘substantia’: the thing no longer has the figure or value of ‘an underneath’ (308). Nabokov’s early novels thus sensitize us to the presence of things, to reexperience them by the activating light of his literary imagination.